We've had trainings, tried new foods, explored our city, and met new people! We've had a bunch of meetings on how we'll be teaching and we've met Kelly, the Chinese school employee who coordinates everything with ILP. She is great and we've all heard good things about her from previous volunteers.
It's a good thing I brought some snacks from home, because the cafeteria food here is no Panda Express. Breakfast consists of vegetables (usually cabbage), some kind of noodles, a hard-boiled egg, and a roll. At first I was excited because on the first day I saw the roll and it looked like an uncooked cinnamon roll so I thought it could be good. WRONG. It literally has no taste at all...Lunch and dinner are usually pretty similar: rice, vegetables, a bit of meat, greens, a roll, etc.. Hopefully there are some good restaurants around so we don't have to eat cafeteria food all the time.
Yesterday we made the trek over to the Jiajiyue (pronounced Jaja I think) supermarket. It's HUGE and has just about anything you could possibly need. We stocked up on some snacks (they have some American candy!), saw the fish market, and then hauled all our stuff back.
Tonight Kelly took us all out to a hotpot restaurant! They put a bunch of tables together so we could all sit close, and there was so much food! Different kinds of meat and fish, dumplings, noodles, greens and tofu all went into the hotpots in the tables. Once they were cooked, we dipped them in little bowls of sesame sauce and soy sauce. I'm still working on using chopsticks effectively. As a few of us were walking home from dinner we saw some people dancing in a park right in front of the school so we stopped to watch. There was a group dancing with pompoms to some pop music, and there was a group with fans dancing to some more traditional-sounding music. Other people were rollerblading or walking around. It was fun to stop and watch them!
